Tax Incidence

Abstract

Tax incidence is the study of who bears the burden of a tax. It distinguishes between statutory incidence (the legal requirement to remit a tax) and economic incidence (the change in real income or wealth resulting from a tax). Considerable advances have been made since the mid-1980s in our understanding of the burden of taxes in imperfectly competitive models as well as in intertemporal models. In particular, analysing lifetime tax burdens can give markedly different results for many taxes. Increases in computing power and the availability of large-scale data-sets have also enriched our understanding of tax incidence.